New diary comics dudes! You can click on any of the images to see them on Flickr, along with the rest of them going back to January 1. Or just click here to see the whole set!

I cannot overstate (so far) how much more awesome the State Employee’s Credit Union is than Bank of America. Or any other bank I’ve ever had an account at. Although SECU has now messed up my checks twice, but on the other hand I have yet to get charged for pretty much anything. OH EXCEPT THE $1/MONTH SERVICE CHARGE WHICH IS IT THAT’S ALL THE ONLY CHARGE CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? I love it.

Oh man. This week’s strip is up. Warning: it’s super-mortifying if you have allergies to ponytails with the sides sort of half-shaved, or chin beards, or any of a number of other problematic choices I made throughout my life. God only knows what I will think of how I look right now in another few years.

I’ll probably be like, “GORGEOUS!” though, actually. Gorgeous.

Continuing my tale of itchy youth! Man, I have a lot of stories that take place at the camp I mention on this page, but I will leave those for their own cartoons later. I loved it though. My memories of school and camp and all that are mostly pretty positive; I’m always surprised by how many people hate those times in their lives. I would go back in a second, I sure would. In a SECOND!

New strip is up, yo! Still working kinks out of this style, changing some stuff here and there. Sweetest change that worked out is that this original is on cream card-stock I bought at Kinko’s, and it’s all in dip pen. Makes it both harder and easier, but I love how chunky it makes the lines. So hope you dig that.

But in this case, super time consuming, so that’s all I have to say for now. Lots to do today, let’s get to work! Okay everybody let’s do it!

This week’s strip is going to be a day late, as I’m, well, still working on it. I’m also struggling to finish my piece for the Covered art show going on in LA in March. So wish me luck on that badboy, I’ll be chained to my drawing board all day inking and coloring and likely ruining the very nice pencils I did for it. Oh and my strip too, it’s looking sweet as well–could be a good week for Dharbin comics!

Or an abject failure. TIME WILL TELL! In the meantime, here are some more diary comics, the entire set of which you can read in order at Flickr.

Beginning this week, a new story which will be 10 pages I think, or at least that’s how many in the strip. I might drag it out an extra page depending on how the panels shake out.

I’m more excited about this story than usual, because for the first time I’m starting to get closer to the kind of simple, clean, open style I want, without all the gobbledygook and crosshatching and stuff I normally throw in there to cover for bad composition. The extra plus is that it’s much faster to do pages when you fill big spaces with white or black instead of a million useless details. Progress feels good! I hope you guys like it.

More diary comics! You can view the whole set to date (since January 01, 2010) here on my Flickr. Warning: excessively mundane. If you’re into the banal, then that should read: ADDED VALUE: excessively mundane!

If you’ve ever seen Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje on OZ, then you know what I mean.

I’ll tell you what it means Dharbin–not much. Yet. But soon it will mean something, I feel sure. I FEEL SURE.

This week’s strip is due completely to the kind intervention of Chris Butcher, who pointed out (rightly) that it was probably a bad idea to take a week off my strip while in the middle of trying to build my audience with a goofy promotion. I couldn’t think of anything to make a strip ABOUT though, and was in the middle of trying to get ready for Jim Rugg and Chris Pitzer to stay in my house. So I wrote Chris into things, and in the absence of an actual story idea it was easier to just make him lose his temper.

Really Chris, just calm down, come on now. I didn’t really do him justice, although I feel like the last panel actually looks like him, which was frustrating–since that was the last one I drew of course. What can you do?

My entry for Hourly Comics Day. Kate Beaton suggested that people actually do something interesting so that their hourlies wouldn’t be totally dullsville. I’d been meaning to visit the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, which just opened last month. It was pretty amazing; I think I’ll write about it later in the week here.

But anyway! Hourly comics dudes. Kind of exhausting, to tell you the truth. I made them a little more “finished” in honor of the day, even using pencils! Which means they took forever, which sucks. So. There you go. Begin the minutiae!

Oh man I just reread those, they’re so boring! Oh well, sucks for you! BUT, because I love you, here are some much better ones I have seen, mostly people I follow on Twitter:

Nathan Stapley
KC Green
John Allison
Matt Wiegle
Meredith Gran
Raina Telgemeier
Britt Wilson

Those are just the ones I could find quick. I haven’t read any of them, but just glancing at them to find the links, I’m pretty much regretting putting mine up at all. C’EST LA VIE, THE INTERNET!! Also, note that several of those come from the Hourly Comic Day forums, where there are a bajillion more from all over the country.

This week’s strip was originally published in black and white as part of Wide Awake Press’s “Ancient Age” anthology and Free Comic Book Day thingie. I thought that coloring it would be super quick, and I could re-present it here as a week’s strip and thus get WAY AHEAD on some longer-format stuff I’m working on. WRONG, DHARBIN! Coloring this took me 1,000,000 years, not because it’s super complex or anything, but because I kept shooting myself in the foot trying to keep 4 balls in the air at once. I try to do all my strips as if they were going off to print immediately, so for all the color strips you see there are high quality print versions socked away on my computer as well, complete with high-res bitmap top layers for maximum scrumptiosity.

But this strip, originally 8 black and white pages (2 panels per page) is mainly stitched together from different pieces of art, which in itself was originally a labor-saving device. “Why, I could just draw one background and then Photoshop in a bunch of little dudes! It’ll take no time at all!” Oh man. The number of workflow mistakes I made on this are pretty humbling, just one after the other; it doesn’t help that the art is 8 months old now, so of course all the actual artistic gaffes I made are super obvious to me as well.

I’d originally thought when starting this post that I might go through and enumerate some of the more glaring errors in my coloring process on this thing, both to set them in my mind for future avoidance AND in case they’d be edifying to anyone else. But now the idea just fills me with sorrow. Plus today is Hourly Comics Day, so I need to get things done so I can get out of the house and do things worth hourly-comics-izing about. I think I’m going to go to an art museum and try to fall through something valuable.

But anyway, you can read this week’s strip right here!